August 30, 2022
This message is distributed to Senate-Faculty and Non-Senate-Faculty. (Click here to view description of distribution groups.)
The following is being sent on behalf of the UCSB Library
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Beginning September 1, 2022, UC corresponding authors publishing in Elsevier’s prestigious Cell Press and The Lancet journals will be able to publish their articles as open access with financial support from the UC libraries. Cell Press publishes 50 scientific journals in the life, physical, earth, and health sciences. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals.
When UC reached its landmark open access agreement with Elsevier in 2021, the full suite of journals published by Cell Press and The Lancet were not included. UC and Elsevier agreed that these high-cost journals would be phased in at a later date, once certain financial terms of the agreement were met. The inclusion of Cell Press and The Lancet titles adds to the 2,300 Elsevier journals that have been eligible for open access publishing support since the start of the agreement in 2021.
The agreement now enables corresponding UC authors to publish open access in Cell Press and The Lancet journals, regardless of whether they have research funds available to pay for open access publishing. All authors who choose to publish open access will receive a 10 percent discount on the open access fee (also known as an article processing charge, or APC) and the UC libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the APC. For authors who do not have funds available to pay the remainder, the libraries will cover the full cost of the APC on their behalf, ensuring that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors who wish to publish open access.
"We are able to make this financial support for open access publishing in subscription-based Cell Press and The Lancet journals available now because many UC authors publishing with Elsevier in the past year have contributed research funds to pay a portion of the open access article publication fees,” said Ellen Finnie, Director of Shared Collections in UC’s California Digital Library. “This important step is a reflection of how UC's shared funding model can work -- and enables us to add library support for authors publishing in these titles now, as well."
For more details, please see the overview and FAQ of the Elsevier open access agreement.
To learn more about UC’s open access publishing agreements, visit the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website or contact the UCSB Library Scholarly Communication Support Team at openaccess@library.ucsb.edu.